


a heart sick with missing pieces

by serpentineshadows



Category: One Piece
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Mentions of Ace's death, Sabo-centric, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-28 00:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15696111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentineshadows/pseuds/serpentineshadows
Summary: Sabo is used to his missing memories, but that doesn't mean he's content with not knowing. When they finally come back, it's in the worst way possible.Or, Sabo dealing with his amnesia and then Ace's death in unhealthy ways.





	a heart sick with missing pieces

When Sabo closes his eyes, he hears laughter, a scuffle, some roughhousing. It’s achingly familiar, a memory, a clue to his forgotten past. He reaches for it, struggling to remember _more_ , but all he’s left with is the fuzzy image of a wide, gummy smile, his more useful memories just a tickle at the edges of his mind.

A constant reminder that he’s incomplete, and no matter how hard he tries to remember—until his head’s pounding and he’s sweating with the effort—he can’t. Nothing definitive ever comes to him. There’s flashes of a smile, of freckles. He hears a proud voice, scolding at times and comforting at others, and a crybaby. He feels fondness, a burning desire to stay, tinged with sadness, the familiar hint of paranoia. It’s never enough information; he only gets the ghosts of memories, hovering over him, always there.

Sabo stares at the ceiling, the stiffness of his mattress already hurting his neck. He shoves his blankets away and fumbles around in the dark, pulling on his outfit. He heads outside to train under the night sky, surrounded by a darkness that’s calming instead of suffocating. Punching, kicking, and jabbing at the air clears his mind, alleviating his headache.  
  
When Koala and Hack find him, he’s managed to push his frustration over his missing memories to the back of his mind. Koala scolds him for forgoing sleep in favor of training, but she doesn’t ask why. The two of them already know why without him saying, and so they join him in his training, offering comfort without words.

  


Sabo’s sent on mission after mission: solo, with Koala, with Hack, or with the both of them. Dragon says he shows promise, and so he throws himself wholeheartedly into work for the Revolutionaries.  
  
As long as he works, his mind is taken away from what he’s missing, what he still doesn’t know about himself.  
  
Because of this, he climbs the ranks fast, graduating from grunt work to paperwork. Instead of being the one sent out, he’s the one sending others out, planning out missions for others. Somehow, Sabo’s more exhausted than before, always swamped with more and more work. He welcomes the exhaustion, a reprieve from the lack of memories that still plagues him. The only downside to this promotion is that he doesn’t get to see more of the world.

  


Sabo’s sorting through a list of up-and-coming pirates, deciding which ones might be useful to the Revolutionaries, when he comes across the super-rookie, Fire Fist Ace. Reading the newspaper article about Fire Fist makes Sabo grin. A pirate who refuses to become one of the World Government’s dogs is definitely one to keep an eye on.

It’s as he looks down at the wanted picture accompanying the article that his head starts to hurt. The crooked smile, the necklace of red beads, the strange hat…they all push memories to the forefront of his mind, but the memories aren’t clear enough. Just small snatches of conversations, gleeful shouts, the view of the sea.

Throwing the newspaper and Fire Fist’s wanted poster to the side, Sabo goes to bother Koala for a spar.

(She ends up wiping the floor with him, but Sabo’s fine with that. Sore muscles and bruises are easier to deal with than the hole in his memories.)

  


Sabo follows Fire Fist’s journey, though, and the official trail ends after Fire Fist’s devastating fight with Jinbe. He has the skills and the resources to find out more, and so he does, his whims indulged by Dragon.

Fire Fist has joined Whitebeard’s crew, and it’s an interesting, if not surprising, turn of events. But no matter how great Sabo’s argument is, Dragon doesn’t let Sabo replace the current liaison between the Revolutionaries and the Whitebeard Pirates.

It’s frustrating, but Sabo can’t argue that there’s not much reason for him to be the liaison when he has so much other work to do.

So, Sabo does what he knows best and throws himself into his work. He finishes weeks’ worth of work in a couple of days, feeling dead on his feet, wanting nothing more than to close his eyes and rest. Instead, Sabo steals a ship and tracks down the Whitebeard Pirates to observe them from afar.

A bright flare of flame erupts on deck, and a small figure darts forward to attack Whitebeard himself. The poorly planned attack is easily thwarted, and Sabo doesn’t see the rest of it because his head hurts so, so bad.

He’s running on almost no sleep, the smallest amounts of food. He doesn’t even have the energy to try and see if he can remember more, to see if Fire Fist’s display has loosened any more memories in his brain.

When Koala and Hack come to collect him, somehow right on his tail without him even noticing, Sabo doesn’t protest too much. Koala scolds him, but it’s not as harsh as usual. He closes his eyes, the last thing he sees their concerned faces, and falls asleep.

  


After his latest stunt, Koala observes Sabo more closely, forcing him to rest when needed and dragging him away from work to have fun sparring with her and Hack.

It’s nice, sort of, except for the fact that it means Sabo’s not bone-tired when he lays down on his bed to go to sleep. His mind races as he stares up at his ceiling, trying and trying and _trying_ to remember more.

On one such night, Sabo’s mind strays toward a pirate from the new generation of super-rookies: Straw Hat Luffy. Straw Hat’s bounty has been growing in leaps and bounds, which makes Dragon smile wryly when he sees the poster, an uncharacteristic reaction but one Sabo dismisses in favor of thinking about his own.

The most prominent feature of Straw Hat’s wanted poster is his happy-go-lucky smile, reminding Sabo of the vague smile in his memories. The more he thinks about it, the more his head hurts again, and so he sneaks out of bed, heading towards his office.

Sabo works until he collapses, and that’s how Koala finds him in the morning, her disappointed face the first thing he sees.

  


The newspapers report Ace’s death, congratulating the Marines for ending the despised spawn of Gold Roger and the adopted brother of Straw Hat Luffy…as well as Sabo himself.

The atmosphere on the base is grim because Whitebeard has always been a trusted ally, more likely to align himself with the Revolutionaries if he encounters them than not. But for Sabo, the loss is _personal_.

He’s shut himself in his room, just staring at the stupid newspaper article, written by someone who knows nothing about Ace. His eyes burn, and so does his heart. It feels like he’s been walking around this whole time with an arm chopped off, inconvenienced by it not being there, but now he’s looked down, noticed it’s gone, and its loss is finally hitting him.

Ace and Luffy have never been by his side, not once during the long years he’s spent in the Revolutionary Army; the friends he’s made, cautious at first, have filled a hole he knew was there—his amnesia too obvious to ever let him forget—but now Sabo knows they’re like triangles trying to fill the space left by a square.

There’s still gaps left by Ace and Luffy, and Sabo tries to stifle his sobs as he reads the same despicable line in the newspaper for what feels like the twentieth time because at the very least, the ones left by Ace will never be filled.

Ace is _dead_ , never coming back, and Sabo didn’t lift a finger to help him.

Sabo reaches for a bottle of sake, tucked inside a drawer because he didn’t really have a use for it, but now he does. He wants to forget, something he’s never wanted to do so badly since he woke up on Baltigo, because Ace is gone.

He’s gone, and Sabo is used to loneliness, living while being haunted by a past he doesn’t remember. He’s used to it, _he’s used to it_ , but it’s different now because he remembers. He remembers Ace’s precious smiles, his laughter, a treasure Sabo managed to uncover with Luffy’s help. He remembers, so he finds himself reaching for Ace and Luffy, after _years_ of not having them by his side, only to remember.

Sabo’s memories are clear now, sharp, and now it feels like just yesterday, they were all kids, reckless, fearless, and full of dreams. Nothing has _really_ changed except for what he remembers…and Ace’s _death_ , but Sabo feels like he’s drowning in loneliness, surrounded by a darkness that reminds him of his loss at every turn.

He downs the whole bottle of sake, a temporary solution to help him sleep dreamlessly. Waking up the next morning, he regrets it and throws himself into work.

Koala comes by to scold him and help him reorganize his life, a small comfort. Hack, too, tries to distract Sabo, but it’s less successful than before. Dragon hovers, watching, a dark and silent figure. They all worry for him, and it does help, a little. Their presence rubs a soothing balm into the cracks in his heart, filling the void Ace has left him.

The damage is never truly undone because Sabo finds himself alone in his office sometimes, at night, free to just think. That’s when thoughts of Ace plague Sabo the most because Ace is a constant presence in his mind now, has always been there, just hidden away. It’s comforting sometimes to imagine that Ace is living on in his mind but also not truly sane, and so Sabo laughs to himself at his desk, surrounded by work, in a room illuminated only by moonlight.

Sabo gets better, but he also gets worse because he clings onto memories of Ace tighter than he held his vague, confusing memories before. He keeps hanging on, even if it’s only so that he can see Luffy later, so that he can change the world that’s painted Ace as a villain, so that he can greet Ace with a smile when it’s all over and tell him about all he’s accomplished.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what I'm doing because I don't even like angst. I like the opposite of angst. And I don't know how to write Sabo, and it probably doesn't help that I wrote part of this at 1 am and the other half just now. 
> 
> For the record, I should state that basically all of my works are like first drafts because I get distracted really easily. And that I'm not the best at coming up with titles.
> 
> I was actually doing so well with not writing sad stuff. I should really go write that Caesar Clown idea I've been sitting on for, like, a year to make up for this.


End file.
